


Happier

by beelivia



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Angst, M/M, Pining, Sad, past relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-08-29 08:41:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16740733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beelivia/pseuds/beelivia
Summary: Mike comes back from an undercover assignment and realizes that Sonny has moved on without him. (Based on “Happier” by Ed Sheeran)





	Happier

**Author's Note:**

> Beta: @jewishbarba on tumblr

Mike has only been back from his undercover trip for a couple days when he decides to go to central park for a jog. After the arrests, debrief, and psych eval, he’s been given a week off to help him adjust to his normal life again. Disappearing for a couple years with everyone he cares about thinking he’s dead hasn’t been easy. The first thing Mike did when he got his phone back was call Sonny, only for it to dial tone back at him in a signal that his former boyfriend’s number has since changed. Going back to the squadroom is too hard for now, so he hasn’t returned there either. 

All of that accumulates into a mid-morning run on the winding sidewalks through the park. Exercising has a way of making him forget everything except the burning of his muscles and the rush of endorphins that come from pushing himself hard enough. All he has to think about is continuing to move. The cold air of early morning New York is fresher in his face than it has been in a long time. When he was undercover, he spent ninety percent of his time in stuffy rooms surrounded by men who wanted to destroy everything good in the world. Freedom tastes like city smog and cheap coffee, he thinks to himself as he passes one of those kiosks who prey on exhausted young mothers trying to get in their morning exercise before they have to go about their day taking care of screaming children and shuttling them from school to soccer practice without a second thought for their easy monotony.

He envies the simplicity of it all. Their lives are warm. Their houses are lived in with pictures on the walls and toys on the floor and clothes left on the bathroom tile floor. Their meals are prepared with thought of what will taste good, not what the bodega on Mike’s block sells for single serve TV dinners he thinks taste rather like cardboard. He lives alone in a bleak apartment procured for him, since disappearing off the face of the Earth  has a way of tanking hiscredit and making him unreliable to most renters.

Mike thinks again of going by the precinct, but he knows it would be too hard for him. Seeing the lieutenant, Rollins, Fin, Carisi. Mostly Carisi, if he’s honest. Before all this, the two of them had something genuine and real. Now it’s gone, and he can’t begin to imagine how Sonny would react to finding out the lies he’d been told. Angry, hurt, devastated… they don’t begin to cover it. His father knows of course, had been there in the building when Mike’s UC stint officially ended and patted him on the back for being a hero. Always a hero, never a human. The scar on his abdomen from the Munson incident twinges in remembrance. Before then, Mike had never truly felt pain, no matter how much he thought he had.

Without realizing, he’s slowed to a lazy walking pace and abandoned his attempt at exercise to force his mind blank. It appears that his life is weighing too heavily on his shoulders now, and that all he can do is work through the tangled web until he figures out how to breathe properly again. Waking up in the middle of the night with fleeting memories of the things he saw has made his lungs perpetually work at half capacity. Once or twice it’s gotten bad enough he wonders if it has anything to do with the gunpowder and dust he inhaled on more than one occasion when he couldn’t pull his shirt up over his face fast enough.

Lost in his reverie, he almost misses the ghost of a Staten accent cutting through the morning air like a hot knife through butter. It’s jarring, clanky, disruptive in the peaceful morning in a way he can’t begin to describe, yet at the same time his heart leaps to his throat when he hears it. Carisi. The last time he heard that voice, he was lying in a hospital bed after his boss came up to him and told him he had a unique opportunity to disappear and asked him to choose then and there. He knew what he had to do. And then there was Carisi, holding his hand and saying how worried he was that Mike wouldn’t make it. The amount of willpower it took to hold his silence is something he doesn’t know to  this day how he was able to manage.

He looks around almost wildly for the source and his eyes land on Carisi, sitting at a metal table by one of the coffee vendors. Hazy light filters through his dark hair with more grey in it than Mike remembers, but his suit is just as crisply tailored and his posture is open. Leaning back, relaxed, a bright smile on his face. For a moment, Mike forgets how to breathe entirely. He’s missed him. All of a sudden, it hurts, knowing that he left him. The urge to go talk to him is overpowering before Mike realizes that he’s not alone.

Sitting across from Carisi is another man, maybe a little younger, with short brown hair and an imposing frame. The other man is equally relaxed, enjoying a steaming paper cup of what Mike assumes is coffee. As Mike watches, he says something that makes Carisi laugh and cock his head to the side the way he used to when he was flirting with Mike. And it all occurs to him, in that moment, that Sonny has moved on and fallen in love with someone new. He looks so happy. Happier than Mike ever saw him when they were together.

Head down, he keeps jogging past them. He’s close enough to hear the man call Carisi “baby” in a tender voice the way he could never make himself do because of his own fears. This happiness is what Carisi deserves. To disrupt this in any way would be a sin Mike could never forgive himself for, and so he prays to go unrecognized as he hurries away.

For an eternity, he’s alone with the sound of his feet slapping the concrete. He breaks into a run. Mike runs as fast and as far as he can, even when his lungs burn and his muscles cry, and doesn’t stop until he reaches his barren apartment and lets himself inside. The second he’s locked in, he falls to the carpet and starts to sob.

**Author's Note:**

> My tumblr is @honeycarisi


End file.
